Clemson Center for Geospatial Technologies Inspires Campus-Wide GIS Use

Growing global challenges, including climate change, need creative solutions, and higher education institutions will increasingly play a vital role in empowering future generations with the knowledge, skills, tools, and interdisciplinary collaboration necessary for innovative outcomes.

One university is doing so by integrating geospatial technologies within diverse academic disciplines. Clemson University's Center for Geospatial Technologies (CCGT), established in 2016, fosters a community of interdisciplinary geospatial science practitioners through the support of research, teaching, and outreach activities. CCGT assists students, faculty, and researchers to leverage geographic information system (GIS) technology within their disciplines and bridge global connections between academic, industrial, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations worldwide.

Centrally located in the Cooper Library, CCGT hosts upward of 3,000 people a year and teaches 11 workshops per semester to provide a basic understanding of GIS.

In addition, it serves as a resource when geospatial services are needed, including offering drone imagery, mapping, and analytics services university-wide. Departments such as Agriculture, Automobile Engineering, Athletics, and Campus Operations have participated. 

"This model has been a game changer in terms of collaboration to eliminate data redundancy and lower costs," said Patricia Carbajales-Dale, executive director, Clemson Center for Geospatial Technologies.

In seven years, CCGT staff leveraged workshops, word of mouth, department collaborations, campus events, and more to scale the center to where it is today: a valuable academic and operational resource. Currently, the center employs six staff members and offers internship roles. The center also facilitates workshops led by student collaborators and members from information technology (IT).
 

"We have a great relationship with our students and faculty, and for me, that is where our support starts. [CCGT] is a service, and our job is to support people at Clemson," said Carbajales-Dale.

The journey to creating CCGT began in 2014 as a collaboration between the IT department and librarians at Clemson Library to ensure that GIS more widely benefited the campus. At the time, the university had an enterprise license agreement and seven labs dedicated to geospatial equipment. Departments such as Environmental Engineering, Forestry, and Geology were primarily benefiting from GIS.

"Clemson University had a lot of investments in GIS, remote sensing, exclusive labs, but no one to directly support it. The technology was falling into the hands of faculty who were very overwhelmed," said Carbajales-Dale. "The chief information officer at the time had this vision to add a human component to the investment to make the most of the technology for the community."

That human component was Carbajales-Dale, hired in 2014 as a facilitator to ensure the technologies' impact grew campus-wide. To expand this vision, Carbajales-Dale first offered basic GIS workshops on campus for students and faculty. The courses had high-attendance rates and offered opportunities for Carbajales-Dale to learn from others where GIS support could enhance campus learning.
 

"Some departments didn't have faculty but wanted a semester-long course taught. Some faculty needed support to stay up-to-date on the technology, while students needed help with a thesis or for undergraduate research," continued Carbajales-Dale. "Our solution needed to offer flexible support; we needed to show some sort of sustainability—so we created the center."

CCGT received funding for three years with the intent to become self-sufficient through cost-sharing of equipment, licenses, drone insurance, and more. CCGT staff began building a sustainable foundation by nurturing buy-in with various faculty members, students, and other departments to find collaborative opportunities that met the needs of the university.

"Buy-in doesn't happen overnight. It took a few years, but we started with faculty, and we showed them by doing the things they needed that we were there to support them; they're our biggest champions," said Carbajales-Dale.
 

Carbajales-Dale said center staff overcame buy-in challenges by tailoring their approach to understand the users' end needs. Often this meant meeting with department chairs, lecturers, or students one-on-one to understand what technology they could benefit from in their disciplines or even developing example syllabi.

By 2017, the center's popularity grew, and staff introduced a cost-sharing model through strategic partnerships with other departments. This new model moved the center toward self-sustainability while empowering staff to maintain specialized equipment and develop new support programs for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and light detection and ranging (lidar). By having the center and departments cost-share, geospatial and imagery requests are fulfilled within the university instead of being outsourced.

Most recently, the center and several other university departments contributed to the costs of a drone imagery project spanning the entire campus. Over 12 days, more than 7,000 high-resolution aerial photos were captured. The detailed aerial view of the campus allows departments such as facilities to see where maintenance is needed. Moreover, CCGT staff used Clemson's Palmetto Cluster supercomputer to process the images and generate GIS products such as orthomosaics and digital surface models.

"This partnership between two very centralized units, the libraries and IT, I believe, has given the center the best of both worlds," added Carbajales-Dale.

In addition to the work CCGT provides across campus, Clemson University is a land grant institution, meaning staff provide public services and research across the state. For example, Clemson University was awarded $3 million by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to support the Intelligent River project. The project entails designing, developing, and deploying a basin-wide network of computerized sensors to monitor water quality stretching across the 312-mile Savannah River. CCGT staff will be using ArcGIS to help the 40 scientists on the project visualize and monitor the real-time data collected from the sensors.
 

As the world grapples with complex challenges from COVID-19 to climate change and population growth, higher education institutions will continue to find creative ways to empower students to be future leaders and problem solvers. Many will follow the lead of Clemson University, imparting knowledge, skills, and the use of technology tools like GIS. This trend toward interdisciplinary collaboration bodes well for a future where experts across industries and nations can work together on important issues.

Today, CCGT provides a range of services to faculty, students, administration, and campus operations. Services include GIS fundamentals; course development; weekly workshops; outreach activities; field data collection; and access to drones, 3D printers, lidar, and UAVs.

From the classroom perspective, CCGT supports six to eight classes a semester by providing workshops, lectures, or training related to the subject matter in a coteaching setup with the faculty member. Disciplines such as architecture, forestry, geology, and natural resources regularly incorporate CCGT as a resource. As part of ongoing efforts to make GIS more accessible to students in disciplines outside technology and science, staff have offered curriculum support, consultations, and training sessions for social sciences and humanities programs. These efforts have led departments such as Anthropology, Sociology, History, and Public Health to bring GIS to the classroom.

"We are beyond proud for making GIS approachable and less intimidating to all disciplines across our campus," said Elham Masoomkhah, GIS manager at Clemson University. "Through CCGT support efforts, we have developed our GIS community from the ground up. We are humbled by an enormously increased demand for our services and are doing our best to answer the needs of our GIS community."

One example of CCGT's outreach to other disciplines is a course cotaught by Carbajales-Dale and Natallia Sianko, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Clemson University. The class, Globalization & Social Change: Intro to GIS for Public Health, Visualization for the Social Sciences, was an interdisciplinary approach to teach students theory and technical application. The purpose of GIS in this course was to show students how to use ArcGIS StoryMaps as a tool to develop their final project. During the technical session, students set up their accounts and create a practice map.

"Social science students typically have a solid theoretical understanding of how the world works or should work, and 'hard science' majors often have a very focused view of how a specific process works. It can be difficult to pair up these two perspectives," said Sianko. "The collaboration is a perfect example of connecting the course content with technology to address challenges."

Sianko and Carbajales-Dale have collaborated multiple times on research and course content development for graduate students. In one instance, the pair worked together on a session that was part of a five-week module class. Carbajales-Dale taught a session introducing social science graduate students to graphical exploration and presentation of quantitative and qualitative data. "Patricia's class was a perfect illustration of how to apply interdisciplinary approach using a real example from our life today, here and now," continued Sianko.

Carbajales-Dale hopes to continue offering GIS in non-science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses with a future goal to extend services to the school of business.

CCGT received recognition from Esri as an official development center in 2019 and has made a lasting impact on Clemson University. To meet expanding GIS needs, the center established a GeoAmbassador program, which empowers undergraduates through postdoctoral researchers who have experience with GIS or spatial skills to create a workshop to teach their peers. The center also sponsors a student-led group called the Clemson Mappers, which promotes spatial thinking and GIS on campus. Despite the pandemic, in 2020, CCGT had over 1,388 students attend their workshop series, including 55 faculty members, and hit a new attendance record for the first workshop of the series.
 

As the world grapples with complex challenges from COVID-19 to climate change and population growth, higher education institutions will continue to find creative ways to empower students to be future leaders and problem solvers. Many will follow the lead of Clemson University, imparting knowledge, skills, and the use of technology tools like GIS. This trend toward interdisciplinary collaboration bodes well for a future where experts across industries and nations can work together on important issues.